6. Installation

The following sections describe which machines are supported by ECL,
how to build and install it on them. You should read at least Section 6.1 and in particular Table 1
which details the other sections containing installation instructions for
your platform.

In Table 1 we show the operating systems in
which ECL is known to run and where it is regularly tested. Note that ECL
might successfully build on other platforms, and that porting is relatively
easy. We regularly get reports on ECL being built on other platforms (ARM,
Motorola 68x, Sparc, etc), so the best thing is to try yourself.

6.2. Autoconf based configuration

ECL, like many other free programs, can be built and installed a GNU
tool called Autoconf. This is a set of automatically generated scripts that
detect the features of your machine, such as the compiler type, existing
libraries, desired installation path, and configures ECL accordingly. The
following procedure describes how to build ECL using this procedure and it
applies to all platforms except for the Windows ports.

Unpack the tar file

$ gunzip -c ecl-16.0.0.tgz | tar xf -

Choose a directory in which you will install ECL. Following
the Unix covention we will use
/usr/local

Run the configuration file

$ cd ecl-16.0.0
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local

If you are building under Solaris 9 you should replace the last line with

Open the Windows SDK terminal, which will set up the
appropriate paths and environment variables.

6.3.2. OpenBSD and NetBSD

Before following the instructions in Section 6.2 you should install the following packages: boehm-gc and gmp-4.1 or better. Another component, libffi will be needed if you want to use the dynamic foreign interface.